When a Los Angeles television writer and producer learns that an SS officer may have stolen stamps from Jewish concentration camp prisoners and hidden them in a Polish basement, he sets off on a years-long quest to find the rumored box of long-lost valuables — despite uncertain evidence they exist and long odds of locating them.
It sounds like the plot of a detective novel, but it’s a true tale that unfolds in the suspenseful documentary “The Stamp Thief,” screening at the 45th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
How Gary Gilbert found out that a trove of stamps belonging to Jews might be buried 4 feet underground in Legnica, Poland, is a circuitous tale in itself. It begins with a psychiatrist who happened to have a patient in the 1970s who was married to a Nazi officer’s daughter. The patient tells the story of the missing stamps, and the psychiatrist becomes so intrigued, he helps devise an elaborate retrieval plan to dig them up behind the Iron Curtain. He never follows through, but he shares the plan with his son, who later relays it to Gilbert — who just happens to be an avid stamp collector.
Having trouble keeping track? As the movie unfolds, the pieces fall into place — and the story becomes increasingly engrossing.
“The Stamp Thief” is part heist film, part twisty mystery and entirely historical reckoning, as Gilbert and the team he brings to Poland in 2015 grows ever more invested in returning the stamps to their rightful owners. So does the audience.
The mission is steeped in symbolism. For Gilbert, a single stamp not only represents the many thousands of them stolen from Jews, but the 6 million who could never reclaim their personal treasures. “I knew the second I heard the story that I’m going to go, because the only thing crazier than going to me would be to not go,” Gilbert says in the film.
What’s craziest is how Gilbert tries to retrieve the stamps. The more he talked to lawyers, the more he realized how difficult it was to get seized Jewish property out of Poland. So he conjured a plan to access the basement by pretending to use it as a film set for a fake historical drama. The operation echoes the one in “Argo,” the 2012 thriller based on the real-life plan to rescue six Americans who took refuge at the Canadian ambassador’s residence in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
The Poland expedition means deceiving the Polish building manager, residents and film crew, and members of the American team grapple with the ethics and fallout of their dishonesty. The team includes Oscar- and Emmy-winning director Dan Sturman as well as Gilbert’s personal contractor, who poses as the set designer but really comes along to supervise the surreptitious dig for the stamps during pretend rehearsals in the basement. All who are involved hope that once the truth comes out, the people who were misled will understand that the deceit happened in service of righting a greater wrong.
Instead, reactions to discovering the truth are largely disheartening, though one unexpected hero emerges in Polish crew member Sylvia, who chooses to fully support the group and its mission and ultimately becomes a producer of the film.
“I wish that people could be different, but each person has to be responsible for himself,” she says. “This is my decision as a Polish person.”
Despite its weighty subject matter and chilling footage of antisemitism in present-day Poland, “The Stamp Thief” has lighthearted moments, like when Gilbert’s family reacts to his madcap plan with amused astonishment. “You’re just going to go fly across the world,” his daughter asks, “steal Nazi treasure, maybe go to jail, maybe not, figure it out when you get there?” Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. So are the stamps found? No spoilers here, but the story is just as much about the driving belief that restorative justice for Holocaust victims matters as deeply now — 80 years after history’s horrors — as it ever has.